micro wind farms with no forest clearing.

Wesley johnsen

Posts: 91

2

posted 2 years ago

for people that want to lease their land for wind energy the question i have is can there be a micro wind farm with a small tower like a light post but very tall and not those massive wind turbines? like say no forest clearing and the small wind turbines put alongside an existing logging road and a lot of them so they generate a ton of electricity. this electricity could be sold to generate forest conservation money.

Wesley Johnson : This is a good question which deserves a serious answer, but First you must do a little home work !

Location, Location, Location ? !!! Look at your 'Name of the Person Posting'-Space and L@@K at mine ! A little research will show that I live within 50 miles of Commercial
Wind Farms !

All of them are on large open Farm fields, mostly pasture, some crop land ! These are the Mega- Monsters that everyone including the Koch Bros. Hates !

Basically The 'Power companies will cover the Open land areas, and build out at sea to take advantage to the twice a day wind shift patterns to produce Electrical Power.
After the U.S. is covered with the big boys in the choice open field locations, someone might look for other special locations to develop

A second thing to consider is the fact that the current crop of wind turbines are tall to get up into higher speed winds with less loss due to Ground clutter and loses related
to Laminar-Flow ! I strongly expect that the trend over the next 20 years or so will be to go bigger and Bigger ! I also expect that that is where the investments and
development Dollar$ will go !

Check your local Yellow pages and 'seek it local' .com/org/net for someone who wants to sell you a wind turbine, they will have a Tall antennal looking thing that they can
erect on your property to record wind speeds and determine if any wind turbine will be a good investment on your property ! For the Craft! Big AL !

Success has a Thousand Fathers , Failure is an Orphan

LOOK AT THE " SIMILAR THREADS " BELOW !

Brian Hamalainen

Posts: 100

Location: Chimacum, WA Sunset Zone 5, USDA Zone 8B

5

posted 2 years ago

In the Les Stroud "SurvivorMan" side video, "Off The Grid" (http://vimeo.com/22771069 ), he puts up a small wind generator that doesn't need any trees cut down. It does still need a tall steel pylon though... One might be able to get away with the top of a power/telephone pole or with small arms bolted to a tall tree which is on the edge of the main forest. I'm not sure how much power they produce, especially if they are not risen above the surrounding terrain.

R Scott

Posts: 3305

Location: Kansas Zone 6a

32

posted 2 years ago

Yes you can, but is it worth it? It is a return on investment question.

Micro wind generators are really bad ROI to begin with (they are expensive for the amount of power you get), and adding more tower gets REALLY expensive over a certain height.

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Topher Belknap

Posts: 205

Location: Midcoast Maine (zone 5b)

posted 2 years ago

1

1) Towers need to stay up in a heavy wind. That means either thick post, or guy wires.

2) Wind turbines need to be up in the smooth wind. The rule of thumb is 30 above any obstruction within 100 feet.

3) Power is a function of swept area, a 10 foot bladed turbine is 100 times better than a 1 foot bladed one.

4) Power goes up by the cube of the wind velocity. And winds get stronger the higher you go.

5) Commercially viable locations are being taken by commercial companies. This doesn't mean that personal sites are bad.

I don't have a wind turbine yet (do have solar up and running) but it's my understanding the towers need to be SIGNIFICANTLY higher than any obstruction within several tower lengths, both for faster winds, but more importantly for less bearing-eating turbulance. As the turbulance goes higher the amount of stress on the moving parts goes up to the point the windmill lifespan is shortened.

Another very, very important issue is where is the power going to go to? This requires lots of very thick gauge copper wire, which gets expensive really fast. The wire to string windmills all over everywhere will cost more than the value of the amount of power they produce. NIMBY (not in my back yard) is one of the single most important issues in windmill site selection. People just don't want them anywhere around. You see the Catch-22 here? Windmills need to be placed far enough away that people don't complain (and there are LOTS of complaints), but close enough that you can string wire to them.

Lastly, as TP outlines, it must withstand very high winds. My land has winds that can topple 18" diameter Oak trees. That's where I get all my firewood. The kind of stucture that can survive winds like that, 30' or more in the air, must be very beefy.